Word: apollo
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Morse, who photographed the launching of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, from Cape Canaveral in 1958, and has been on hand for nearly every manned flight since, vividly recalls the only previous tragedy in the U.S. space program. It occurred in 1967, when an Apollo capsule caught fire on the launch pad, and Astronauts Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee perished in the inferno. Only the day before, Morse had been shooting aboard their spacecraft, and his photos of the three men lying strapped in their seats were used by NASA to study the accident that killed...
...Bill Nelson, who, like Garn, had flown on a shuttle, proposed that seven of the newly discovered moons of the planet Uranus each be named for one of Challenger's victims. Colorado Republican William Armstrong went a bit further, asking the Senate to name ten moons, adding the three Apollo astronauts who died in the 1967 launch-pad tragedy as well. Democratic Representative Mickey Leland of Texas urged that the "true heroes" all be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, a photo of Challenger's crew, draped...
...aptly all-American group: two women, a black, a Hawaiian of Japanese descent and three white men. The mission had originally been scheduled to lift off Jan. 20 from NASA's Pad 39-B, which had been refurbished after standing idle since an American crew aboard Apollo 18 left it to dock with a Soviet spacecraft ten years ago. The date slipped to Saturday, Jan. 25, after one of the other three space shuttles, Columbia, ran into delays with a mission that got relatively little notice because such flights had seemed so routine...
...explosion that destroyed Challenger inevitably evoked memories of an earlier tragedy in America's space program. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the first manned Apollo spacecraft as it sat atop its Saturn 1-B rocket during a test at Cape Kennedy. The blaze killed Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, 40, Edward White, 36, and Roger Chaffee, 31, who until last week were the only astronauts to perish aboard a U.S. spacecraft...
Grissom, the second American in space, White, who made the first U.S. space walk, and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had been scheduled to run through a simulated Apollo launch. Suited up, they clambered into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream...